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My enthusiasm for playing Diablo II builds that I’ve been wanting to push to the endgame for decades, but for some reason or other never did, is still going strong.

While the Blade Fury Assassin is a lot of fun, after having her beat Hell difficulty I concluded that she’s not going to become one of my go-to farming characters after all. I’d really like to have another one of those though, not so much for boss killing, but for density-farming in terror zones. As my last visit to Uber-Tristram netted me my second Necro torch I decided to finally try a Poison Nova Necromancer in earnest. And good thing that I did, because holy crap, that dude rocks!

As the name suggests this skill is the venomous version of the Sorceress’s Nova and Frost Nova, and like all kinds of poison in DII it deals its damage over a set period of time. Luckily, in this case we’re only talking about two seconds, so while not nearly being “instant”, enemies lose health quickly enough to not die of old age beforehand.

I don’t know why, but it’s strangely satisfying to get in, spray two quick bursts of green goo all around me, get out again, and then watch my enemies drop dead like flies without me doing anything at that particular moment.

Now, I remember giving up on this build at around level 50 many years ago, mainly because its damage just couldn’t keep up with the monsters’ health and resistances anymore. While that would be bad news for any kind of character, it makes the life of a poison based one absolutely miserable. You just can’t afford to wait until the venom has done its thing, then reapply, wait again, so on and so forth…the monsters will rip you to shreds long before their own life runs out.

I guess what I’m saying is, this is definitely one of the more gear-dependent builds. Fortunately I’m not as poor anymore as I was during most of my Diablo II career – mainly due to my characters not getting deleted every time I take a break anymore – so this time around I was able to push things much further.

Aside from getting Poison Nova itself to as high a level as possible and maxing out its synergies the most important thing to increase the effective damage output is lowering the enemies’ poison resistance.

Of course the most obvious method is to use the Lower Resist curse the Necro has access to anyway. That alone doesn’t cut it for very long though, especially once poison immune monsters become more common, which happens as early as Act IV on Nightmare. I won’t go into the exact math of immunities here, all we need to know is that an immunity has to be broken before damage of the respective type can have an effect at all, and then gear with stats like “-x% to Enemy Poison Resistance” can take its full effect.

So what I usually do is to try and break any poison immunities with Lower Resist, and if that’s not enough I fetch the appropriate sunder charm from the Horadric Cube and put it in my inventory. I’ve talked about what those do here, keep in mind however that they are much harder to acquire nowadays (it’s quite bad, honestly, but that’s a topic for another day).

Once the immunity is broken the aforementioned gear can do its thing.

Specifically, my Necro wears three pieces of the Trang Oul’s Avatar set, most importantly the shrunken head (i.e. shield), which grants -25% to Enemy Poison Resistance when worn with at least two more pieces. The gloves give +20% Faster Cast Rate as well as +25% to Poison Skill Damage, and the belt has the all-important Cannot Be Frozen, so this is a lot of bang for only three bucks, so to speak.

Even more important is the weapon he wields, a Death’s Web unique wand. Its most impactful stat is -40% to -50% (rolled randomly) to Enemy Poison Resistance. Unfortunately that thing is one of the rarest pieces of gear in the game, and I’ve never seen one drop myself.

Which is one of the main reasons why I’ve always played online, despite only rarely teaming up with other players – I can trade for stuff I can’t find.

Obviously a perfectly rolled specimen is worth an arm and a leg, but compared to not having one at all a -40% piece is already a huge damage boost, so I got myself exactly that for the low price of one Ist rune.

I also asked Larzuk to punch a hole in it and plugged in a decently rolled Poison Rainbow Facet, and now this Necro kicks some serious ass indeed.

There’s one last piece of gear that I feel is almost a necessity, and unfortunately there’s no cheap version of this one: the Enigma runeword armor.

It’s the one pretty much every DII player at least knows about, because it grants its wearer one level of Teleport, regardless of class. It also sports +2 to all skills, loads of magic find and more…calling it overpowered would be an understatement. It’s no surprise then that quite a few players use it on every high level character they play – even Sorceresses.

I’m not such a big fan, but its usefulness can’t be denied, and for Poison Nova in particular it really is extremely strong. The ‘go in, cast once or twice, go out’-approach mentioned above just doesn’t work all that well without it.

It’s very worth the investment though. The build has exceptional clearing capabilities, on my account only surpassed by the Bowzon, and even she gets slowed down considerably by physical immunes, whereas the Necro can farm quickly anywhere. Also, with Poison Nova there’s no aiming required whatsoever – killing monsters like leapers and blood hawks, which can be very annoying to deal with for many builds, is easy as pie.

I also dig that I rarely feel the need to use Corpse Explosion. When the screen is chock-full of monsters, and/or they get constantly healed or revived, then, yes, I blow everything up. But usually I get by without it no problem.

Lastly, I’m glad to finally play a caster class that doesn’t have to rely on their mercenary wearing an Insight polearm for its mana-regenerating aura. I mean, he does spend quite a lot, but many of his gear pieces have either mana or some form of mana regeneration on them, and if push comes to shove I just quaff a potion once in a while. This freed up his weapon slot, so I gave him an Obedience socketed into in an ethereal Mancatcher.

With that he really slaps, and he also leeches enough life to die very rarely, which is obviously great.

So, yeah, if you’re tired of boss rushing and are looking for a build to clear whole zones with efficiently, one that requires an active and fun playstyle while not being completely overpowered – you can still die very easily if you’re not careful – look no further.

It’s been almost 25 years since Diablo II got its first and until very recently only expansion, Lord of Destruction. Of the two new classes it introduced to the game the Assassin appealed to me the most by a landslide.

As I’m a huge fan of all things martial arts that’s no surprise of course. She uses claws as her weapon of choice, throws shuriken and traps, hides in the shadows, kicks the crap out of her enemies…did I mention that she throws fricking shuriken?

Despite all this I never made it beyond level 25 or so whenever I created the first Assassin on a new account though. I don’t know why exactly, she just didn’t klick with me for some reason or other.

Some of her skills, most importantly Blade Fury, which is the shuriken one, were buffed in patch 2.4 however, and now I also have the complete Natalya’s Odium set at my disposal for the first time. So I finally buckled up and pushed her all the way through Normal and Nightmare, as well as half of the way through Hell.

She’s at level 79 now and indeed wears Natalya’s set, which unfortunately isn’t even close to her best-in-slot gear, but it’s ok for now and makes her look pretty cool to boot.

The Blade Fury playstyle is a lot of fun. You hold down the button, and she hurls throwing stars, about five of them per second, in the direction you’re aiming. This is as close to “beam weaving”, which I quite enjoyed in Marvel Heroes, as you can get in DII. Well, except for the Sorceress-skill Inferno, but that one’s so crappy that we don’t talk about it.

BF also has a pretty huge range, with the stars reaching farther than you can actually see on screen.

Blade Fury alone doesn’t cut it on higher difficulties though, where monsters are too numerous and have too many hitpoints to kill them all like this. Enter Death Sentry, which is one of her various traps. She throws these on the ground, and whenever there are targets in range they do their thing. In this case that means blowing up the corpses of dead enemies for massive AoE-damage, just like the Necromancer does with his skill Corpse Explosion.

The thing about the Necro skill is…I don’t like it all that much. Not because it’s crap, but because it’s too damn good to not use it.

You see, whatever flavour of Necromancer you play, the answer to all of his problems is always Corpse Explosion from the moment he gets access to it. As a summoner – wait until the minions have offed the first opponent, then blow everything up. Poison or Bone skills? Kill one, explode the shit out of the rest. You get the picture. To me that’s boring und uninspiring.

I don’t know why, but throwing a trap or two and let them do the exploding does make a world of difference to me. I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I guess to my mind throwing those traps just fits the Assassin’s playstyle, whereas clicking the corpses manually and blowing them up instead of reanimating them or something doesn’t sit right with me on the Necro.

Whatever it is that makes it work for me, I’ll take it. It also provides for a pretty active playstyle, while thankfully not being as fast and nausea-inducing as, say, a Frenzy Barbarian.

Of course the Assassin also has her own set of support skills and passives.

Since claws are her signature weapons – she’s the only one who can equip them, too – she has some passive skills to boost their damage, attack rating and even block chance, with the latter only working when she holds a claw in each hand to prevent using a shield and effectively double dipping.

She also has some good crowd control skills at her disposal. One blinds the targets and lowers their defenses, another even charms some of them into attacking their peers while stunning the rest.

You’re not an Assassin if you can’t control your own shadow, right? In DII it’s actually an autonomous helper that attacks stuff on its own, and you can even choose between a version that uses the same skills as you do, and one that has all of the Assassin’s skills on hand.

Two very strong buffs round out her arsenal. Burst of Speed makes her run and attack a lot faster (which unfortunately doesn’t work for Blade Fury for some reason), while Fade provides resists and damage reduction. For balancing reasons you can only use one or the other though, not both at the same time.

I’ve always appreciated the love for little, seemingly insignificant details that Blizzard poured into their games during the nineties and early noughties (and Overwatch too, to give credit where it’s due), and DII is no different in that regard.

When they designed the new classes they obviously asked themselves “What can we do to differentiate them from the others?” Apart from her signature set making her near invisible instead of glow like a Christmas tree the Assassin got one little perk that suits her well thematically. It’s a really small one, but still pretty nice: she can pick locks, meaning that she doesn’t need keys to open locked chests. Like I said, it’s a small detail, not nearly enough to make the other classes fundamentally inferior to her or anything, but it comes in handy for sure.

Ever since the introduction of Charms inventory space in DII has become even more precious, so not having to lug around a stack of keys is a greater boon than one might think. It’s also one less supply of stuff that needs to be maintained, and since Reign of the Warlock we can even set the loot filter to hide those keys from our overview. So, again, it’s just a small perk, but still great.

And there you have it. The Blade Fury Assassin, as well as the class in general, really is a lot of fun.

Once we know more details about how Blizz intends to change the runeword Mosaic, which has been the uncontested go-to for martial arts Assassins ever since its introduction – because it’s hopelessly overpowered – I’ll probably try that out next.

So, yeah, Diablo II Resurrected really got an expansion, including the first new class added to the roster since the release of Lord of Destruction in fricking 2001. Which, if you ask me, is pretty huge, and I definitely didn’t have something like this on my Bingo card for 2026 (or any other year, for that matter).

Of course there’s lots of criticism going round. No new Act, no new monster types, the Quality of Life features should have been there from the start, so on and so forth.

Personally, I really like what we got. Sure, a new Act would have been awesome, but, again, I basically had made my peace with not getting any new stuff for one of my all time favourite games, so I’ll take it for sure.

What about that new class then? Well, I played the Warlock all the way through Normal difficulty, completely SSF (Solo Self-Found), and it was by far the easiest run I’ve done with any class or build that way. Nightmare came next, and for that I handed down some gear, making the whole affair easier still. Even Tal Rasha’s tombs and the Travincal council, which can be a pretty tough challenge for low- and mid-level characters, were a breeze.

Big fan of summoning builds that I am I went for the Demon-tree of course, and it’s awesome! Back in the original Diablo the monster type Goatmen was the bane of my existence because they are really quick and hit like trucks, so having them do my bidding now feels very satisfying.

Well, I say “them”…in the early game you’ll have to make do with only one. That’s not as bad as it sounds though, as these guys are sturdier and hit much harder than the Necro’s or Druid’s minions. Also, the goats have some sort of cleave attack that can hit multiple enemies, so it doesn’t take ages to kill larger packs either.

Even better than the minions themselves are the supporting skills. Most importantly: we can fricking teleport the buggers on top of a specific enemy and have them attack it! A game changer, that is! Engorge is another great one – consume a corpse to heal all your demons and give them a speed and damage buff on top.

At level 30 we get Bind Demon, and this is where it gets really interesting. This skill lets us bind any one demon in the game, barring act bosses like Andariel and Diablo, to fight for us. It even persists across games, you’ll only lose it if it either dies, you die, or you actively bind a new one.

My first thought was “Holy shit, let’s try to get Hephasto!”, the big burly armorer found at the Act IV Hellforge. I basically just wanted a hard-hitting, tanky beast to fight for me, but I’d completely forgotten that he always has an aura too – Fanaticism or Conviction are great options, depending on which of the other minions you use. This basically makes him the uncontested top choice for a long time, so we’ll see whether they’ll nerf this in some way.

Whichever demon you choose to bind, be careful, as it doesn’t heal or regenerate on its own – unless the monster in question has the innate ability to do so, I suppose – and you can’t feed potions to it like you can to your mercenary. Which means that using Engorge is the only way to keep it healthy, so trying to keep a supply of corpses around is pretty important for difficult fights.

All things considered, the summoning Warlock basically has everything the poor Necro and Druid have always wished they had. Again, it remains to be seen whether any nerfs might be incoming.

Traditionally each caster class begins the game with a weapon that grants one level of a starting skill. In case of the Warlock it’s Miasma Bolt, which does most of its damage via a small “cloud of entropy”, meaning that it’s an AoE. I was still using that in Act II to kill bigger packs more quickly without having invested any additional skillpoints into it, which is saying something.

I assume you’re noticing a trend by now – the Warlock seems to be designed to have AoE-capabilities right from the start, no matter which route you decide to go. It’s almost as if someone on the current dev team agrees with me that it’s actually not all that much fun to click thousands of baddies dead one by one, no matter how well the game is designed otherwise.

Overall the Warlock is very strong and also a blast to play. I hope they don’t nerf the fun things into oblivion, but toning him down a bit numerically might actually be necessary.

Now let’s talk about the new stash tabs, shall we?

Well, they’re awesome! What did you expect?

I will say, however, that collecting, sorting, upgrading and storing gems and runes has always been a big and even quite enjoyable part of the gameplay loop for me, so I do have mixed feelings about this. There’s no denying how infinitely more convenient this is though, so I would by no means want to go back.

As you can see they’ve even baked the Horadric Cube functionality into these tabs (provided the character you’re on has one), as well as a shortcut to move three gems or runes at once to it, making upgrading even easier. Also, the tab for Essences, Uber Tristram keys and so on also holds both types of Rejuvenation potions, which I really appreciate.

The loot filter is pretty neat, too.

What I really like about it is that each single profile can have multiple independent rules set up. Due to this I don’t have to create a completely seperate profile for my Bowzon, for example, instead I just uncheck the rule “Hide Ammo” and leave everything else as is.

One feature that’s missing, unless I somehow just fail to find it, is the ability to change the colors of specific item types, add stuff like colored borders to them or even have the game play a sound effect when something really valuable drops. These things helped me immensely when I played Path of Exile to never miss anything good.

So there’s still some room for improvement.

Finally, let’s adress the elephant in the room: is this really a proper expansion, and is it worth the admission fee Blizz is asking?

As for the former – that’s debatable. If we don’t count romping through the same five acts we all know inside and out, just with a new class this time, actual new content is pretty thin on the ground indeed.

However, I’m still completely fine with the 25 Euros they’re charging. About a year ago I argued that Blizz selling us cosmetics and stash tabs was long overdue. If they had gone that route I would’ve gladly shelled out something like five bucks each for the three different currency tabs, and another two or so per additional shared tab (of which we got a pair). Which means that I basically got the Warlock, various new items and a slightly overhauled endgame for a grand total of six Euros. As far as I’m concerned that’s a pretty great deal.

Now get cracking on that wardrobe system already!

No, this is not an early April Fool’s joke! I took that screenshot myself, ingame, just a few minutes ago.

Yes, Diablo II Resurrected has really gotten an expansion! New Class! New items and runewords! Additional endgame activities! Loot Filter! (!!!) Currency Stash Tabs! (!!!!!) …

…and I’m too fricking sick to play right now, goddammit!

So my deep dive and subsequent report will unfortunately have to wait, but I at least wanted to let y’all know. You can find all the details here.